The Favorite Game (9 page)

B
reavman loves the pictures of Henri Rousseau, the way he stops time.

Always is the word that must be used. The lion will always be sniffing the robes of the sleeping gypsy, there will be no attack, no guts on the sand: the total encounter is expressed. The moon, even though it is doomed to travel, will never go down on this scene. The abandoned lute does not cry for fingers. It is swollen with all the music it needs.

In the middle of the forest the leopard topples the human victim, who falls more slowly than the Tower of Pisa. He’ll never reach the ground while you watch him, or even if you turn away. He is comfortable in his imbalance. The intricate leaves and limbs nourish the figures, not malignly or benignly, but naturally, as blossoms or fruits. But because the function is natural does not
diminish its mystery. How have the animal flesh and the vegetable flesh become connected?

In another place the roots sponsor a wedding-couple or a family portrait. You are the photographer but you can never emerge from under the black hood or squeeze the rubber bulb or lose the image on the frosted glass. There is violence and immobility: the humans are involved, at home in each. It is not their forest, their clothes are city clothes, but the forest would be barren without them.

Wherever the violence or stillness happens, it is the centre of the picture, no matter how tiny or hidden. Cover it with your thumb and all the foliage dies.

I
n his first year of college, at a drinking place called the Shrine, Breavman rose up with this toast:

“Jewish girls are not any more passionate than Gentile girls of any given economic area. Jewish girls have very bad legs. Of course, this is a generalization. In fact, the new American Jewess is being bred with long, beautiful legs.

“Negro girls are as screwed up as anyone else. They are no better than white girls, except, of course, the Anglo-Saxon girls from Upper Westmount, but even drugged sheep are better than they are. Their tongues are not rougher, nor is there any special quality in the lubricated areas. The second-to-best blow job in the world is a Negro girl I happen to know. She has a forty-seven-thousand-dollar mouth.

“The best blow job in the world (technically) is a French-Canadian whore by the name of Yvette. Her telephone number is Chateau 2033. She has a ninety-thousand-dollar mouth.”

He raised high his cloudy glass.

“I am happy to give her the publicity here.”

He sat down among the cheers of his comrades, suddenly tired of his voice. He had been expected for dinner but he hadn’t phoned his mother. Obediently the new shot of Pernod turned white.

Krantz leaned over and whispered, “That was quite a speech for a sixteen-year-old virgin cherry to deliver upon us.”

“Why didn’t you pull me down?”

“They loved it.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Go stop you, Breavman.”

“Let’s get out of here, Krantz.”

“Can you walk, Breavman?

“No.”

“Me neither. Let’s go.”

They supported each other through their favourite streets and alleys. They kept dropping their books and clip boards. They screamed hysterically at taxis that cruised too close. They tore up an economics text-book and burnt it as a sacrifice on the steps of a Sherbrooke Street bank. They prostrated themselves on the pavement. Krantz stood up first.

“Why aren’t you praying, Krantz?”

“Car coming.”

“Scream at it.”

“Police car.”

They ran down a narrow alley. A delicious smell stopped them, bestowed by the kitchen-ventilating fan of an expensive restaurant. They relieved themselves among the garbage cans.

“Breavman, you won’t believe what I almost peed on.”

“A corpse? A blonde wig? A full meeting of the Elders of Zion? An abandoned satchel of limp a-holes!”

“Shh. C’mere. Carefully.”

Krantz lit a match and the brass eyes of a bull-frog gleamed from the debris. All three of them jumped at the same time. Krantz carried it in a knotted handkerchief.

“Must have escaped from a garlic sauce.”

“Let’s go back and liberate them all. Let the streets swarm with free frogs. Hey, Krantz, I’ve got my dissecting kit!”

They decided on a solemn ceremony at the foot of the War Memorial.

Breavman spread loose-leaf sheets on his Zoology text. He grasped the frog by the green hind legs. Krantz intervened, “You know, this is going to ruin the night. It’s been a very fine night but this is going to ruin it.”

“You’re right, Krantz.”

They stood there in silence. The night was immense. The headlights streamed along Dorchester Street. They wished they weren’t there, they wished they were at a party with a thousand people. The frog was as tempting to gut as an old alarm clock.

“Should I proceed, Krantz?”

“Proceed.”

“We’re in charge of torture tonight. The regular torturers are relieved.”

Breavman swung the head smartly against the inscribed stone. The smack of living tissue was louder than all the traffic.

“At least that stuns it.”

He laid the frog on the white sheets and secured it to the book with pins through its extremities. He pierced the light-coloured abdomen with the scalpel. He withdrew the scissors from his kit
and made a long vertical incision in first the upper and then the lower layer of skin.

“We could stop now, Krantz. We could get thread and repair the thing.”

“We could.” Krantz said dreamily.

Breavman pinned back the stretchy skin. They pressed in over the deep insides, smelling each other’s alcoholic breath.

“This is the heart.”

He lifted the organ with the small edge of the scalpel.

“So that’s the heart.”

The milky-grey sack heaved up and down and they stared in wonder. The legs of the frog were like a lady’s.

“I suppose I should get on with it.”

He removed the organs one by one, the lungs, the kidneys. A pebble and an undigested beetle were discovered in the stomach. He exposed the muscles in the delicate thighs.

Both of them, the operator and the spectator, hovered in a trance. And finally he removed the heart, which already looked weary and ancient, the colour of old man’s saliva, first heart of the world.

“If you put it in salt water it’ll keep on beating for a while.”

Krantz woke up.

“Will it? Let’s do it. Hurry!”

Breavman tossed his text-book together with the emptied frog in a wire trash-basket as he ran. He cupped the heart in his hand, afraid of squeezing. The restaurant was only a minute away.

Don’t die.

“Hurry! For Christ’s sake!”

Everything had a second chance if they could save it.

They took a faraway booth in the bright restaurant. Where was the damn waitress?

“Look. It’s still going.”

Breavman placed it in a dish of warm salt water. It heaved its soft weight eleven more times. They counted each time and then said nothing for a while, their faces close to the table, immobile.

“It doesn’t look like anything now,” Breavman said.

“What’s a dead frog’s heart supposed to look like?”

“I suppose that’s the way everything evil happens, like tonight.”

Krantz grabbed his shoulder, his face suddenly bright.

“That’s brilliant, what you just said is brilliant!”

He slapped his friend’s back resoundingly. “You’re a genius, Breavman!”

Breavman was puzzled at Krantz’s tangent from depression. He silently reconstructed his remark.

“You’re right! Krantz, you’re right! And so are you – for noticing it!”

They seized each other’s shoulders and pounded each other’s backs over the Arborite table, bellowing compliments and congratulations.

“You genius!”

“
You
genius!”

They spilled the salt water, not that it mattered. They turned over the table. They were geniuses! They knew how it happens.

The manager wanted to know if they’d like to get out.

T
he heavy gold frame of his father’s picture was the first thing he noticed. It seemed like another window.

“You’re wasting your life in bed, you’re turning night into day,” his mother shouted outside the door.

“Will you leave me alone? I just got up.”

He stared for a long while at his bookshelf, watching the sun move from the leather Chaucer to the leather Wordsworth. Good sun, in harmony with history. Comforting thought for early morning. Except that it is the middle of the afternoon.

“How can you waste your life in bed? How can you do this to me?”

“I’m on a different cycle. I go to bed late. Please go away.”

“The beautiful sun. You’re ruining your health.”

“I still sleep my seven hours, it’s just that I sleep them at a different time than you sleep yours.”

“The beautiful sun,” she wailed, “the park, you could be walking.”

What am I doing arguing with her?

“But mother, I walked in the park last night. It was still the park then, in the night.”

“You turn night into day, you’re using up your time, your beautiful health.”

“Leave me alone!”

She’s in bad shape, she just wants to talk, she’ll use any maternal duty as an occasion for lengthy debate.

He rested his elbows on the window sill and let the landscape develop in his thought. Park. Lilacs. Nurses in white talking together beside the green branches or pushing dark carriages. Children launching their white sailboats from the concrete shore of the blue pool, praying for wind, safe journeys or spectacular wrecks.

“What do you want for your brunch? Eggs, scrambled, salmon, there’s a lovely piece of steak, I’ll tell her to make you a salad, what do you want in it, Russian dressing, how do you want your eggs,
there’s coffee-cake, fresh, the refrigerator is full, in this house there is always something to eat, nobody goes hungry, thank God, there are oranges imported from California, do you want juice?”

He opened the door and spoke carefully.

“I’m aware how fortunate we are. I’ll take some juice when I feel like it. Don’t disturb the maid or anybody.”

But she was already at the banister, shouting, “Mary, Mary, prepare Mr. Lawrence some orange juice, squeeze three oranges. How do you want your eggs, Lawrence?”

She slipped the last question to him like a trick.

“Will you stop shoving food down my throat? You can make a person sick with your damn food!”

He slammed his door.

“He slams a door at a mother,” she reported bitterly from the hall.

What a mess! His clothes were everywhere. His desk was a confusion of manuscripts, books, underwear, fragments of Eskimo sculpture. He tried to shove a half-finished sestina into the drawer but it was jammed with accumulated scraps, boarded envelopes, abandoned diaries.

What this room needs is a good, clean fire. He couldn’t find his kimono so he covered himself with
The New York Times
and ran across the hall into the bathroom.

“Very pretty. He wears a newspaper.”

He managed to creep downstairs, but his mother ambushed him in the kitchen.

“Is that all you’re having, orange juice, with the house filled with food, half the world fighting for leftovers?”

“Don’t start, Mother.”

She threw open the door of the refrigerator.

“Look,” she challenged. “Look at all this, eggs that you didn’t want, look at the size of them, cheese, Gruyère, Oka, Danish, Camembert, some cheese and crackers, and who’s going to drink all the wine, that’s a shame, Lawrence, look at them, feel the weight of this grapefruit, we’re so lucky, and meat, three kinds, I’ll make it myself, feel the weight.…”

Try and see the poem, Breavman, the beautiful catalogue.

“- here, feel the weight.…”

He heaved the raw slab of steak at her feet, splitting the wax-paper on the linoleum.

“Haven’t you got anything better to do with your life than stuff food down my face? I’m not starving.”

“This is the way a son talks to his mother,” she informed the world.

“Will you leave me alone now?”

“This is a son talking, your father should see you, he should be here to see you throwing down meat, meat on the floor, what tyrant does that, only someone rotten, to do this to a mother.…”